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Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP) is a rare congenital intractable disease associated with a mutation in ACVR1 gene, characterized by skeleton malformations. Ascorbic acid (AA) and propranolol (PP) in combination is reported to minimize flare-ups in patients. FOP leukocyte phenotype may possibly be modulated by AA and PP treatment. In this study, expression of 22 potential target genes was analyzed by RT-PCR in peripheral blood mononuclear cells culture (PBMC) from FOP patients and controls to determine effectiveness of the combination therapy. PBMC were treated with AA, PP and AA+PP combination. Basal expression of 12 of the 22 genes in FOP PBMC was statistically different from controls. ACVR1, ADCY2, ADCY9 and COL3 were downregulated while COL1 was upregulated. ADRB1, ADRB2, RUNX2, TNF-α and ACTB, were all overexpressed in FOP PBMC. In control, AA upregulated COL1, SVCT1, ACTB, AGTR2 and downregulated ADCY2. In FOP cells, AA upregulated ACVR1, BMP4, COL1, COL3, TNF-α, ADCY2, ADCY9, AGTR2 and MAS, while downregulated ADBR2, RUNX2, ADCY1, SVCT1 and ACTB. PP increased ADBR1 and decreased RUNX2, TNF-α, AGTR1, ACTB and CHRNA7 genes in treated control PBMC compared to untreated. PP upregulated ADBR1, ADBR2 and MAS, and downregulated TNF-α and ACTB in treated FOP PBMC versus untreated. AA+PP augmented ADRB1 and ADRB2 expressions in control PBMC. In FOP PBMC, AA+PP augmented ACVR1, COL1, COL3, ADBR1, AGTR2 and MAS expression and downregulated ADBR2, RUNX2, ACTB and MRGD. These data show distinct gene expression modulation in leukocytes from FOP patients when treated with AA and or PP.

Business Intelligence (BI) is increasingly important for the optimization and management of resources, becoming essential for the performance of companies. However, the largest companies are the ones that have been more dedicated to the implementation of BI in their companies. Given that in Portugal the business mass consists of 99.9% of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), so it is necessary to understand how they may adapt to this new reality. This study aims to verify the impact and practicality of BI applications in the most common processes and activities of SMEs. The practical case of a Portuguese company will be studied, where the intention is to implement a new BI tool that will allow the budgeting of its commercial proposals to be fully adjusted to the market and its target customers, thus obtaining a competitive advantage concerning your competitors. This research work aims to contribute to SMEs, in distinct business areas, but, in particular, for the construction companies, to demonstrate that, by using company data and open data, is possible to use data visualization to a data-driven decision with the most updated data.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks are an emerging technology, useful not only for the military, but also for public and civil purposes. Their versatility provides advantages in situations where an existing network cannot support all requirements of its users, either because of an exceptionally big number of users, or because of the failure of one or more ground base stations. Networks of UAVs can reinforce these cellular networks where needed, redirecting the traffic to available ground stations. Using machine learning algorithms to predict overloaded traffic areas, we propose a UAV positioning algorithm responsible for determining suitable positions for the UAVs, with the objective of a more balanced redistribution of traffic, to avoid saturated base stations and decrease the number of users without a connection. The tests performed with real data of user connections through base stations show that, in less restrictive network conditions, the algorithm to dynamically place the UAVs performs significantly better than in more restrictive conditions, reducing significantly the number of users without a connection. We also conclude that the accuracy of the prediction is a very important factor, not only in the reduction of users without a connection, but also on the number of UAVs deployed.

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Distance Education Courses in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) employ tutors for pedagogical support, monitoring of students, and detecting possible dropouts. However, when courses have a higher number of students, there can be a work overload on human tutors, impacting their work quality. To mitigate this problem, artificial smart tutors can be used not only to increase the capacity to meet students' needs but also to improve the monitoring of their performance. Increasing the scalability of online courses can be achieved using an intelligent artificial tutor. Goal: Analyze the viability of an intelligent tutor in meeting the main tutoring demands made by students on Dell Accessible Learning platform. Method: We developed an artifact called STUART that monitors DAL and interacts with students, providing automation, intelligence, and support to the teaching and learning process. We programmed STUART to meet reactively and proactively students' main demands, based on the corpus of interactions scenarios on previous courses. Fourteen participants attended two classes of a Distance Education Course, with and without STUART, where interaction data were collected. Results: For 76% of the participants, STUART helped solve the more frequent problems in the pedagogical, technical, and content levels. There was an average reduction of 87% in the requests for a human tutor and a reduction of 27% in the time needed to finish tasks. That resulted in the preference of STUART compared to the human tutor for 85% of the students. SUS (usability assessment) scored 86.

Objetivo: Identificar na literatura os fatores que favorecem o desmame precoce. Metodologia: Este estudo trata-se de uma revisão integrativa da literatura realizada entre o período de Janeiro a Abril de 2021. Utilizaram-se os descritores: Aleitamento materno, Desmame precoce e Pré-Natal. Os critérios de inclusão foram estudos publicados nos últimos oito anos (2013-2021), estudos originais publicados no Brasil, nos idiomas português, inglês e espanhol e apresentar texto completo. Os critérios de exclusão foram artigos repetidos e/ou que não se encaixam na temática abordada. Resultados: Evidenciou-se, entre os principais fatores que levam ao desmame precoce, a gravidez na adolescência, mãe com baixa produção de leite e condições socioeconômicas desfavoráveis. Conclusão: O pré-natal realizado de forma ideal é a melhor estratégia de promoção ao aleitamento materno exclusivo e prevenção do desmame precoce servindo para identificar pessoas em situação de vulnerabilidade e também como forma de intervenção através do acompanhamento e da educação em saúde.

Background Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) can be used in the treatment of patients with refractory Crohn's disease (CD) when no alternative treatment is available. However, HSCT increases the risk of infections, in particular during the aplasia of mobilization and conditioning. Moreover, intestinal stomas in CD augment the risk of morbidity in immunocompromised patients and under aplastic conditions. The objective of this report was to describe the results of the first year after HSCT in a CD patient with an intestinal stoma. Methods The patient was assessed in respect to disease symptoms and endoscopic findings before the procedure and 30, 90, 180, and 365 days after HSCT. Results No complications were observed during mobilization and conditioning with sufficient CD34+ cells being harvested in just one apheresis session. Toxicity was restricted to the hematological series. Scores of all the CD indexes and the quality of life of the patient improved. However, two of three endoscopic scores remained unchanged even though improvements were found in the appearance of the lesions. Conclusion HSCT may be an alternative treatment for refractory CD in patients with an intestinal stoma, and a priori, carefully selected patients with stomas should not be excluded as candidates for this procedure.

This work presents the research to identify the most feasible way to deliver an augmented reality-based learning object to promote skill development among the deaf to prepare them to job positions in a computer manufacturing assembly line. A mobile app with augmented reality was developed to facilitate such training. To identify the best form of interaction the application had two forms of natural interaction and installed on two kinds of wearable devices. It allowed for the definition of four interaction set configurations. For identify the best arrangement, an experiment was carried out with 80 people (40 deaf and 40 hearing people) that allowed the analysis of quantitative and qualitative factors. After that, we evolved the tool to cope with real objects in the assembly line and assure. sustainable use.

To use a computer, users with spinal cord injury must employ special tools that, in most cases, demand a great effort. In online courses, such tools often become a distraction, which might hinder the learning process. Solutions such as tongue mouses, smart glasses and computer vision systems, although promising, still face considerable usability problems. On the other hand, ANA, our conversational agent that can hear and listen to the student, has proven quite promising [1]. Tests have shown that, while using our assistant, tetraplegia were able to focus more on their studies than on the system’s interface. In this paper, we present our latest advances on ANA’s architecture, introducing a computational grammar that allows for the insertion in online courses of “learning objects” (LOs) to which students can talk in a natural way. Those LOs respond by performing the requested action. We present the grammar used for processing commands in natural language and show how it is integrated with Google’s conversational AI assistant.

This innovative practice full paper presents a Metaphorical Debugger Model (JAD) to support deaf and hearing impaired in the process of learning how to program in Java. In Brazil, 9.7 million people are deaf or hearing impaired (DHI). DHI people usually face several barriers to get proper education. During a series of Java classes conducted by our team, we verified that these difficulties were also related to the use of software that is not tailored for their impairment. We also saw that DHI students encountered many problems while developing and evolving their codes using the traditional tools, for instance, visual signs to perform tasks, can be difficult to understand, in addition, the high degree of abstraction required for the programming logic, can be an accessibility barrier for them. Thus, we decided to propose JAD aiming to provide accessible debugging for DHI. The JAD uses the concept of metaphorical interfaces, adopting appropriate symbols and signs borrowed from traffic to aid in the process of code debugging and evolution. In this paper, we present some user studies with JAD. The results suggest that Java programmers, DHI e non-DHI, had similar performance in task related to software evolution when JAD was used.

This Innovate Practice Full Paper document presents a technological ecosystem for classroom management that we call GSA. GSA is meant to be used in any class/ of any subject/k-college and supports electronically mediated in class, engaging activities learning strategies to reduce dropout rates and create more learning opportunities. In the previous study, we interviewed 123 8th and 9th-grade students and 15 teachers who had been using the GSA for two weeks. The results were promising. An increase in the level of motivation was observed. Being able to mediate in real time, teacher/student interactions create opportunities to capture valuable data that can be used to feed performance/dropout predictors. In this paper, we discuss the introduction of these predictors and how they can be used to foster preemptive measures to mitigate the problem.

O objetivo do presente estudo foi identificar os riscos cardiovasculares em adolescentes estudantes do Ensino Médio de uma escola pública da cidade de Anápolis-GO. Trata-se de um estudo transversal de caráter quantitativo. A população foi composta por um total de 567 alunos de ambos os sexos, selecionados aleatoriamente com idade entre 14 e 17 anos. Para os riscos cardiovasculares foram coletados o Índice de Massa Corporal (IMC); Pressão Arterial (PA) e Circunferência de Cintura (CC). Foram feitas as análises de correlação entre as variáveis por meio do teste de correlação de Pearson e uma comparação entre turmas por meio do teste Crosstabs. Os resultados obtidos na avaliação de correlação das variáveis demonstraram relação positiva entre peso/altura, CC/PAS, demonstrando que adolescentes mais altos e com sobrepeso têm maior risco para doenças cardiovasculares, quando feita uma comparação entre as turmas estudadas. O 1º ano teve destaque devido possuir o maior número de adolescentes com valores de IMC, PAD e CC. Concluiu-se que adolescentes com maior peso e altura têm maiores chances de desenvolver doenças cardiovasculares e adolescentes mais altos podem apresentar alteração na PAD.

The purpose of this study was to characterise the prevalence and risk factors associated with genital mycoplasmas ( Mycoplasma hominis [MH], M. genitalium [MG]) and ureaplasmas ( Ureaplasma urealyticum [UU], U. parvum [UP]) in Portuguese women of reproductive age. The cross-sectional study included 612 cervicovaginal self-collected samples from women aged 15–44 years, tested for MH, MG, UU, UP by polymerase chain reaction. Y chromosome (Yc) DNA was detected as a biomarker of recent unprotected sexual intercourse. The prevalences of UU, UP, MH and MG were 28.4% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.0–32.1), 22.4% (95% CI 19.3–25.9), 8.5% (95% CI 6.5–11.0) and 0.8% (95% CI 0.4–1.9), respectively. Overall, women aged 20–29 years (odds ratio [OR] 1.78; P = 0.010) and the presence of Yc-DNA (OR 2.33; P = 0.038) were associated with an increased risk of UU. Lifetime number of sexual partners was a predictor of UU, UP and MH (OR 2.46; P

The construction of syntactic tree structures is vital to different Natural Language Processing applications. In the meanwhile, the use of monolingual or bilingual structures directly affects the quality of Machine Translation systems. However, manually annotated syntactic tree structures are not only considered as a time consuming task but also a very expensive work, and automatic construction approaches cannot always guarantee the quality of the syntactic trees. In this paper, a system for annotating and constructing synchronous grammar tree structures in a semi-automatic way is proposed. The system is built in the Web environment with a graphical display for users to review and modify alignment relationships between nodes of the tree and strings or trees of the other language. The core part relies on the parsing of Constraint Synchronous Grammar, and consists of several modules in establishing alignments at different levels between the languages, including relationships between syntactic tree and strings of the other language, and bilingual tree alignments. Moreover, it provides import functions in obtaining monolingual skeletal bracketing syntactic tree and Translation Corresponding Tree structures for the creation of synchronous rules in order to have wider applicability.

The growth of the Brazilian aquaculture has stimulated the development of the productive chain of native species, including marine environment. The objective of this study was to evaluate the growth performance of juvenile mojarra fish (Diapterus rhombeus) fed diets containing different concentrations of crude protein (32, 36, 40 and 44 g 100 g-1). The 80 juvenile mojarra (7.2±1.5 g) were kept in 16 circular tanks (150 L). The study design used was completely randomized with four treatments and four repetitions. The fish were fed four times a day. At the end of the experiment (60 days) the final weight, feed intake, weight gain (WG), feed:gain ratio (FGR), protein efficiency rate (PER), energy efficiency rate, specific growth, survival rate and, body composition were evaluated. It was verified significant effect of protein level on the WG, with the best value at the level of 38.20 g 100 g-1 of crude protein. For FGR, the best estimated value occurred with 38.06 g 100 g-1 of crude protein, similar to that reported for the PER (38.91 g 100 g-1). The other performance parameters and body composition were not influenced by crude protein levels. Diet crude protein concentrations between 38.06 and 38.91 g 100 g-1 provide the best performance indices for juvenile mojarra. RESUMO O crescimento da aquicultura brasileira tem estimulado o desenvolvimento da cadeia produtiva de espécies nativas, incluindo de ambiente marinho. Objetivou-se, neste estudo, avaliar o desempenho dos juvenis de carapeba (Diapterus rhombeus) alimentados com rações contendo diferentes concentrações de proteína bruta (32, 36, 40 e 44 g 100 g-1), caracterizando um delineamento inteiramente casualizado, com quatro tratamentos e quatro repetições. Foram distribuídos 80 juvenis (7,2 ± 1,5 g) de carapeba em 16 tanques circulares (150 L). Os peixes foram alimentados quatro vezes ao dia. Após 60 dias, foram avaliados o peso final, o consumo de ração, o ganho de peso (GP), a conversão alimentar (CA), a taxa de eficiência proteica (TEP), a taxa de eficiência energética, o crescimento específico, a taxa de sobrevivência e a composição corporal dos peixes. Verificou-se efeito significativo do nível de proteína com o melhor valor de GP obtido com 38,20 g 100 g-1 de proteína bruta. Para a CA, o melhor valor estimado ocorreu com 38,06 g 100 g-1 de proteína bruta, próximo ao observado para o TEP (38,91 g 100 g-1). Os demais parâmetros de desempenho e de composição corporal não foram influenciados pelos níveis de proteína bruta. As concentrações de proteína bruta na dieta entre 38,06 e 38,91 g 100 g-1 promovem os melhores índices de desempenho de juvenis de carapeba.

It is not enough to offer accessible learning material, accessible learning platform and bilingual tutoring. Deaf or hearing impaired (DHI) java graduates still show poorer perfomance in debugging tasks when compared to their hearing counterparts. Direct manipulation and visual debuggers might improve the odds of securing the DHI a position in the IT industry. We present a study where DHI java graduates perform debugging tasks using a visual debugger and Eclipse. Situated analysis, usability assessment and a formal task performance evaluation show visual debuggers might benefit the DHI programmer.

Teaching a programming language to a person who is deaf or hearing impaired (DHI) has, along with other challenges, the lack of signs to convey basic concepts in computing. This shortage of signs makes learning even harder for the DHI.The creation of signs from co-present discussions involving instructors, translators and the DHI can lead to regionalism, which might hinder their acceptance by members of other DHI communities throughout the country. A way to combat regionalism is through the asynchronous collaborative creation of signs, normally supported by web tools.But are the signs created through web discussions inferior in any way to those created via co-present discussions? This article presents a comparative study on the acceptance of signs created by both methods showing that acceptable and legitimate signs can also be produced using web discussions and the users can not distinguish from which method they come from.

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With the beginning of the 21st century, web applications requirements dramatically increased in scale. Applications like social networks, ecommerce, and media sharing, started to generate lots of data traffic, and companies started to track this valuable data. The database systems responsible for storing all this information had to scale in order to handle the huge load. With the emergence of cloud computing, scaling out a database system has became an affordable solution, making data sharding a viable scalability option. But to benefit from data sharding, database designers have to identify the best manner to distribute data among the nodes of shared cluster. This paper discusses database sharding distribution models, specifically a technique known as hash partitioning. Our objective is to catalog in the format of a Database Scalability Pattern the best practice that consists in sharding the data among the nodes of a database cluster using the hash partitioning technique to nicely balance the load between the database servers. This way, we intend to make the mapping between the scenario and its solution publicly available, helping developers to identify when to adopt the pattern instead of other sharding techniques.

This paper is a theoretical essay. It was developed under intention to do a contraposition between distinct themes: Organizational Routines and Strategy as Practice. As similar founded aspects to both studies areas, we explain: (1) the learning is developed and treated as necessary basis to develop both of strategies as routines; (2) both theoretical branch focus the individual action as source organizational change; and (3) as study object, both theoretical branch also focus inside organizational environment, to groups of people in its practical activities, however it cannot completely disconnect to environmental context that organizational is situated. At the end, the paper concludes that routines and learning are theoretical focus to study Strategy as Practice. In this way, in a juxtaposition of these streams, it can have new possibilities to comprehend the innovative process inside organizations.

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the absorption of metals coming from the domestic sewage supplied through an irrigation system by furrows. For this, the culture corn (Zea mays L.) (AG 405-AGROCERES) was irrigated by two different treatments: irrigation with domestic sewage and water. After the vegeta- tive growth, the collected plants were divided into two parts: grains and leaves. These different parts were subjected to the digestion procedure in an open system and then analyzed by total reflection X-ray fluorescence analysis with synchrotron radiation (SR-TXRF). It was observed that the concentration of metals in the plants irrigated with sewage was higher than in the plants irrigated with water. The results indicate that the absorption of metals, in the leaves and spikes, is directly related to the appli- cation rate of water irrigation. But, in the case of the irrigation with domestic sewage, a larger absorption of metals was observed when the plant was irrigated with 180L appli- cation rate, so much for the leaves as for the spike.

A gaseous position sensitive detector originally designed to operate with X-rays has been modified for using in thermal neutron tomographic systems. This modification included the replacing of the standard argon–methane mixture by 3He-enriched helium. Due to its low-density, helium should be submitted to a relatively high pressure in order to increase its stopping-power for the products emerging from the 3He(n,p)3H nuclear reaction. High pressure however, creates tightness problems. To mitigate this difficulty some heavy gases have been mixed to helium, reducing thus the range of the particles. In this work, three gases have been studied: pure 3He-enriched helium, and its mixture with argon–methane and with propane. For each case the parameters governing the performance of a detector coupled to a tomographic system, such as spatial resolution, linearity and response homogeneity have been determined. Besides that, the modulation transfer function and the distance resolution curve for a tomographic system incorporating a detector filled with those three different gases have been measured. The best spatial resolution – around 800 μm – has been obtained with a helium–propane mixture. This kind of detector is intended to equip thermal neutron tomographic systems, to perform non-destructive assay, exploiting thus the capability of this particle to pass through heavy materials where a X-ray tomography would not work properly. For an equivalent resolution, a tomographic system using a detector of this kind would require a much shorter acquiring time with regard to the first generation systems, since a sample translation is no longer necessary.

This paper explores a number of simple and effective techniques to adapt statistical machine translation (SMT) systems in the medical domain. Comparative experiments are conducted on large corpora for six language pairs. We not only compare each adapted system with the baseline, but also combine them to further improve the domain-specific systems. Finally, we attend the WMT2014 medical summary sentence translation constrained task and our systems achieve the best BLEU scores for Czech-English, EnglishGerman, French-English language pairs and the second best BLEU scores for reminding pairs.

A construção de uma Prótese Parcial Removível (PPR) tem por finalidade a reposição das unidades dentárias perdidas, incorporando-as ao sistema estomatognático, sem ferir o equilíbrio biomecânico, além do grande desafio, na atualidade, de aliar a função à estética. A dificuldade em se conseguir harmonia estética pela presença dos grampos em metal nas superfícies vestibulares de dentes anteriores justifica estudos que visam solucionar esse problema das PPRs, e ainda, o fato de se tratar de procedimento mais simples e menos oneroso para o paciente frente a outras opções de tratamento. Logo, o presente estudo apresentou soluções estéticas para PPR, propondo a comparação de grampos metálicos convencionais na face vestibular com grampos retentores na palatina, através de três casos clínicos de pacientes que apresentavam ausência parcial de unidades dentárias anteriores. Foram confeccionadas duas peças protéticas para cada paciente: 1) enfatizando apenas os princípios biomecânicos e 2) considerando princípios biomecânicos e estéticos. Observou-se que os grampos MDL modificado e Quereilhac são alternativas viáveis para atender às condições em PPRs de indivíduos desdentados anteriores, cujos arcos são Classe III e IV de Kennedy. Desta forma, foi possível constatar que houve melhora estética do sorriso em indivíduos parcialmente desdentados na região anterior, por meio da não visualização de estrutura metálica na face vestibular dos dentes pilares.

Summary According to the Ministry of Health (2006), Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) is hearing loss caused by prolonged exposure to noise. It is characterized as sensorineural hearing loss and is usually bilateral, irreversible, and progressive while the exposure to noise continues. A NIHL is a predictable and preventable disease with an epidemiologically relevant prevalence in urban communities. The hearing loss begins and predominates in the frequencies of 3, 4, and 6 kHz and eventually progresses to 8, 2, 1, 0.5, and 0.25 kHz. In Brazil, regulatory standard 15 limits the exposure to continuous noise to no more than 4 hours' exposure to 90 dBA and a maximum level of 85 dB for a full 8-hour working period. As NIHL is a preventable and predictable disease, preventive action by professionals may be able to change the prevalence of hearing loss in noisy environments.

INTRODUCTION: With the impossibility of prosthetic implantation with a definitive final volume due to dehiscence and posterior extrusion risks, the development of skin-sparing mastectomy provides an ideal condition for the use of a definitive expander implant. Therefore, this study aimed to demonstrate the use of a definitive expander implant and discuss its indications, cutaneous incision, and safety, as well as its advantages and complications. METHODS: Thirty 150 definitive expander implants were used in 27 women who underwent mastectomy between March 1998 and March 2012. RESULTS: Twenty-nine reconstructions were performed immediately after skin-sparing mastectomy and only 1 was performed after a late Halstead mastectomy. The complication rate was low, with seroma being the most frequent (20%), followed by valve dislocation (13.3%), pain in valve location (10%), post-radiotherapy capsular contracture (3.3%), infection (3.3%), and late extrusion (3.3%). No complications such as hematomas, cutaneous incision, and early extrusion were encountered, and none of the cases required surgical repositioning of the expander implant. CONCLUSIONS: Despite its high cost, the use of a definitive expander implant may be considered as a potential breast reconstruction modality because it is associated with low complication rates and is easy to use. In our study, the appropriate indications and systematized cutaneous incisions, combined with the various definitive expander implant shapes and volumes, led to the satisfactory aesthetic results of the breast reconstruction in a single surgical stage.

1.1 Adjuvant In the mid 1950s, we started to have a much better understanding of the biological mechanisms of establishment of metastases and the role of regional lymph nodes as an effective barrier to tumor spread, because malignant cells have been observed in the bloodstream (Fisher, Turnbull, 1955). Early studies with adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery in solid tumors (breast adenocarcinoma implanted in mice) began in 1957 (Shapiro, Fugman, 1957). Based on these findings, Bernard Fisher and colleagues began in 1958, the first collaborative study with the objective of evaluating the response to systemic administration of perioperative chemotherapy in patients with operable breast cancer (Fisher et al, 1958). Good results were obtained in relation to disease-free interval and overall survival in premenopausal women (Fisher et al, 1968). Similar results were also observed by other authors, with the use of multidrug therapy (cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil (CMF) with or without prednisone) in advanced breast cancer (BC)(Canellos et al, 1974 and 1976, Bonadonna et al, 1976). Therefore, the addition of adjuvant polychemotherapy in BC showed gain by controlling survival of micrometastases in patients with lymph nodes affected by cancer or not (Fisher et al, 1975; Bonadonna et al, 1976; Early Breast Cancer Trialists Collaborative Group (EBCTCG ), 1988; Bonadonna, Valagussa, 1983,1985,1987, Henderson, 1987, Fisher et al, 1989; Bonadonna et al, 1995; Mansour et al, 1998, Carlson et al, 2000 and NIH 2000).

As the demand of translating large volume of material between Portuguese and Chinese is increasing rapidly nowadays, especially in the city of Macau, the translation work becomes impractical without the support of effective tools. In order to fulfill this gap and build up a translation workbench environment for translators, a Machine Aided Translation System between these languages, PCTAssist, is introduced. It is a hybrid system that applies not only Translation Memory technology but also Machine Translation methodologies, including the annotation schema of Translation Corresponding Tree (TCT) in the representation of bilingual examples, and the language formalism Constraint Synchronous Grammar (CSG) in analyzing the syntactic structure between the languages to accomplish the translation task.

The construction of grammars and the acquisition of syntactic structures from corpora are always considered as a time consuming task. Moreover, according to the purpose of the application, different standards have to be defined. In Machine Translation (MT), the situation is even more complicated since it covers two languages. In this paper, CSG-Tag, a Constraint based Synchronous Grammar (CSG) Tree Annotation System is proposed. This system provides a semi-automatic annotation process in the creation of syntactic structure of the source sentence linked with the corresponding target sentential patterns. All learned information are stored in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and can be converted into grammar rules in application to MT. Moreover, the system has a function to import monolingual skeletal bracketing syntactic tree and Translation Corresponding Tree (TCT) structures in the creation of CSG rules.

As more parallel corpora between different languages can be collected through the Internet, Statistical Machine Translation relying on these resources has become a hot research topic in recent years. In particular, the Moses off-the-shelf toolkit is widely applied in the creation of translation systems. This paper presents the research work in evaluating different architectures based on Moses in the web environment for handling the translation between different language pairs.

OBJETIVO: Analisar a citorredução de intervalo em pacientes com carcinoma avançado do ovário. MÉTODOS: Estudo prospectivo com 25 pacientes portadoras de carcinoma avançado do ovário (IIIC ou IV) submetidas à citorredução de intervalo. Os critérios de irresecabilidade foram baseados nos do Instituto Gustave-Rousy. Após quimioterapia de indução e reabordagem avaliamos as taxas de cirurgia ótima e a morbi-mortalidade do procedimento além da sobrevida global em dois anos. RESULTADOS: Foi possível citorreduçao ótima em 17 pacientes (68%) com morbidade de 8% e mortalidade de 4%. A sobrevida global em dois anos foi de 68%. CONCLUSÃO: A citorredução de intervalo constitui alternativa terapêutica no carcinoma avançado do ovário possibilitando oportunidade de citoredução ótima a pacientes outrora portadoras de doença irressecável, com morbi-mortalidade aceitável. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the interval cytoreduction in patients with advanced ovarian cancer. METHODS: A prospective study was carried out with 25 patients with advanced ovarian cancer (stages IIIC or IV) who underwent interval cytoreduction. Nonresectability criteria were based on the ones from Gustave-Rousy Institute. After induction chemotherapy and rapprochement we evaluated the rates of optimal surgery and the morbidity and mortality of the procedure in addition to the overall survival at two years. RESULTS: optimal cytoreduction was possible in 17 patients (68%) with morbidity and mortality from 8% to 4%. The overall survival at two years was 68%. CONCLUSION: The interval cytoreduction is an alternative therapy in advanced ovarian cancer, allowing optimal cytoreduction opportunity to patients suffering from unresectable disease, with acceptable morbidity and mortality.

OBJETIVO: Avaliar em pacientes com câncer de mama a expressão imunoistoquímica da cox-2 antes da quimioterapia primária com 5-fluorouracil, epirrubicina e ciclofosfamida (FEC) e a associação desta com tamanho inicial do tumor, estado linfonodal, receptores hormonais, expressão da Her-2 e com a resposta clínica e anatomopatológica. MÉTODOS: Estudo retrospectivo com 41 mulheres portadoras do diagnóstico histopatológico de carcinoma ductal de mama. Foram submetidas à quimioterapia primária com esquema FEC (5-fluorouracil, epirrubicina e ciclofosfamida) na dosagem de 500mg/m2, 75mg/m2 e 500 mg/m2, respectivamente. Os critérios de inclusão foram intervalo etário entre 30 e 70 anos, estadiamento II a IIIA, após comprovação da ausência de metástase, tumor primário de mama, único e unilateral, tipo histológico ductal invasivo e ausência de cardiopatia e gestação. Para avaliação da expressão da proteína Her 2 neuutilizaram-se anticorpos monoclonais de coelho. Para visibilizar a expressão da proteína cox-2 utilizaram-se anticorpos policlonais obtidos do soro de cabras. A avaliação da resposta clínica ao tratamento foi realizada por exame físico mensurando-se o maior eixo tumoral por paquímetro. As medidas foram realizadas à admissão e após os ciclos de quimioterapia primária. Após três sessões quimioterápicas com intervalos de 21 dias realizou-se o procedimento cirúrgico. Adotaram-se os critérios do RECIST. Após a operação foi avaliada a resposta anatomopatológica local, sendo considerada completa quando da ausência de neoplasia invasiva e do componente in situ. Na avaliação imumoistoquímica para os receptores de estrogênio utilizaram-se estrogen receptor NCL-ER6F11 e para progesterona, progesterone receptor, NCL-PGR-312 considerando positiva quando da coloração em 10% ou mais das células tumorais. RESULTADOS: A distribuição segundo estadiamento clínico UICC verificaram-se seis no estádio IIA (14,6%), 22 no estádio IIB (53,6%) e 13 estádio IIIA (31,8%). A avaliação clínica inicial do maior eixo tumoral variou de 2,5 a 15 cm e mediana de 5 cm. Foram identificadas 14 pacientes (34,1%) com estado linfonodal negativo e 27 positivo (65,9%). Observou-se que 19 (46,3%) apresentavam-se no menacme e 22 (53,6%) na menopausa. CONCLUSÃO: Houve associação da expressão da cox-2 à fatores de pior prognóstico no câncer de mama como estado linfonodal positivo, receptores hormonais negativos e expressão da Her-2. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the immunohistochemical expression of cox-2 before primary chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil, epirubicin and cyclophosphamide (FEC) and its association with initial tumor size, lymph node status, hormone receptors, expression of HER2 and the clinical and pathological response in patients with breast cancer. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective study with 41 women with histopathological diagnosis of ductal breast carcinoma. They underwent primary chemotherapy with FEC regimen (5-fluorouracil, epirubicin and cyclophosphamide) at 500mg/m2, 75mg/m2 and 500 mg/m2, respectively. Inclusion criteria were age range between 30 and 70 years, stage II to IIIA, absence of metastasis, primary tumor of the breast, single, unilateral, with ductal invasion at histology and absence of heart disease and pregnancy. To evaluate the expression of HER2/neu protein we used rabbit monoclonal antibodies. To visualize the expression of cox-2 protein we used polyclonal antibodies obtained from goats' serum. The evaluation of clinical response to treatment was performed during physical examination by measuring the major tumor axis with a pachymeter. Measurements were taken at admission and after primary chemotherapy cycles. After three chemotherapy sessions at intervals of 21 days the surgical procedure was carried out. We adopted the criteria of RECIST. After the operation we evaluated the local pathological response, which was considered complete when there was absence of invasive neoplasia and of the in situ component. In immunohistochemical assessing of estrogen receptors we used estrogen receptor NCL-ER6F11 and, for progesterone, progesterone receptor NCL-PGR-312, considering positive the staining of 10% or more tumor cells. RESULTS: The distribution according to UICC clinical stage classified six patients in stage IIA (14.6%), 22 in stage IIB (53.6%) and 13 stage IIIA (31.8%). The initial clinical evaluation of the major tumor axis ranged from 2.5 to 15 cm and a median of 5 cm. We identified 14 patients (34.1%) with negative lymph node status, and 27 positive (65.9%). It was observed that 19 (46.3%) were in premenopause and 22 (53.6%) in menopause. CONCLUSION: There was an association of the expression of Cox-2 to the factors associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer, such as positive lymph node status, negative hormone receptors and HER2 expression.

In this paper, we describe a real-time vision-based tracking system to help students who are blind or visually impaired (SBVI) to follow instructional discourse that employs graphical illustrations. The vision system employs a color model based tracking for both the instructor's pointing behavior and the SBVI's reading behavior, and maps the pointing positions into the same coordinates. Our Haptic Deictic System - HDS system also employs a haptic glove to provide SBVI access to the situated pointing behavior of instructor that is performed in conjunction with speech, and provides the instructor real-time visual feedback on the SBVI's reading actions. Thus, our system supports two-way situated multimodal communication. In this paper, we first introduce our system, and then we discuss studies that show the efficacy of our approach.

The translation quality and parsing efficiency are often disappointed when Rule based Machine Translation systems deal with long sentences. Due to the complicated syntactic structure of the language, many ambiguous parse trees can be generated during the translation process, and it is not easy to select the most suitable parse tree for generating the correct translation. This paper presents an approach to parse and translate long sentences efficiently in application to Rule based Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation. A systematic approach to break down the length of the sentences based on patterns, clauses, conjunctions, and punctuation is considered to improve the performance of the parsing analysis. On the other hand, Constraint Synchronous Grammar is used to model both source and target languages simultaneously at the parsing stage to further reduce ambiguities and the parsing efficiency.

Extracting the alignment pairs is a critical step for constructing bilingual corpus knowledge base for Example Based Machine Translation Systems. Different methods have been proposed in aligning parallel corpus between two different languages. However, most of them focus on structurally similar languages like English-French. This paper presents a method of cross aligning Portuguese-Chinese bilingual comparable corpus. The proposed approach is based on Singular Value Decomposition techniques and similarity measurement, which covers the problem in aligning structurally dissimilar corpus and enhances the accuracy of the alignment result.

OBJETIVOS: Avaliar a associação entre concentrações séricas de ferro, zinco e cobre, perfil nutricional e ocorrência de diarréia entre crianças residentes em uma comunidade de baixa renda no município de Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. MÉTODOS: Trata-se de um estudo transversal, que avaliou 104 crianças, na faixa etária de 1 a 5 anos, selecionadas entre os meses de abril a dezembro de 2004, pelo projeto Vila Rosário. Avaliou-se o perfil socioeconômico das famílias e de saúde das crianças, incluindo a ocorrência de diarréia. A avaliação nutricional incluiu peso, estatura/comprimento, índices peso-para-idade e estatura-para-idade, expressos em escores-Z e classificação do estado nutricional segundo estes índices. As concentrações séricas de zinco, ferro e cobre foram determinados em uma sub-amostra (n=59) a partir da técnica de florescência de raios x por reflexão total com radiação síncroton. RESULTADOS: As crianças residiam em domicílios caracterizados por condições sanitárias insatisfatórias, com famílias numerosas e com baixo poder aquisitivo. A prevalência de diarréia no último mês foi de 55,7%. Cerca de 28,4% das crianças apresentaram déficit ponderal e 4,9% delas déficit estatural. A deficiência de ferro, zinco e cobre encontrada na amostra foi de, respectivamente, 13%, 7,5% e 8,9%. Não foi observada associação significante entre os indicadores do perfil nutricional e os valores séricos dos minerais. As crianças com relato de diarréia apresentaram valores séricos médios de minerais inferiores aos daquelas sem relato, sendo significante para os valores de zinco. CONCLUSÃO: As crianças com episódios de diarréia podem apresentar comprometimento das concentrações séricas de zinco. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the association among blood serum concentrations of iron, zinc, copper, nutritional status and occurrence of diarrhea in children from a low-income community in Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro. METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study that evaluated 104 children aging from 1 to 5 years, selected in the months of April and December 2004, by the project Vila Rosário. The socioeconomic profile of the families and health of the children were assessed, including the occurrence of diarrhea. Nutritional assessment included weight, height/length, weight-for-age and height-for-age indices expressed in Z-scores and classification of the nutritional status based on these indices. Serum concentrations of zinc, iron and copper were determined in a sub-sample (n=59) by synchrotron total reflection x-ray fluorescence. RESULTS: The children lived in crowded households with unsatisfactory sanitary conditions and were from low-income families. The prevalence of diarrhea in the last moth was 55.7%; 28.4% of the children were underweight and 4.9% were stunted. Iron, zinc and copper deficiencies in the sample were 13.0%, 7.5% and 8.9% respectively. There was no significant association between nutritional indicators and serum concentration of the minerals. Blood serum levels of zinc in children without diarrhea were significantly higher than among those with diarrhea. CONCLUSION: Episodes of diarrhea can compromise blood serum levels of zinc in children.

With the availability of large amounts of multilingual documents, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has become an active research area in recent years. However, researchers often face with the problem of inherent ambiguities involved in natural languages. Moreover, this task is even more challenging for processing the Chinese language because word boundaries are not defined in the sentence. This paper presents a Chinese-Portuguese query translation for CLIR based on a machine translation (MT) system that parses constraint synchronous grammar (CSG). Unlike traditional transfer-based MT architectures, this model only requires a set of CSG rules for modeling syntactic structures of two languages simultaneously to perform the translation. Moreover, CSG can be used to remove different levels of disambiguation as the parsing processes in order to generate a translation with quality.

With the advancement of Internet Technology, increasing number of electronic marketplaces and online auction houses provides real-time transaction services for buyers and sellers regardless of their geographical locations. Easy access to these services has also fueled the need for automating the overall negotiation and decision making process. The annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an international forum designed to provide a competitive benchmark for the trading agents developers around the world. The first TAC was held in July, 2000. In the TAC-Classic category, travel agents compete against each other to assemble travel packages on behalf of several clients. The objective of the travel agent is to maximize the total satisfaction of its clients. During the competition, travel agents may perform three crucial tasks: allocation of resources according to the clients' preferences, prediction of air ticket and hotel prices, and bidding in respective auctions for the required goods. In this paper, we review the algorithms, techniques and heuristics used by the agents which have the highest scores in the last six years of tournaments.

This paper presents a statistical word sense disambiguation with application in Portuguese-Chinese machine translation systems. Due to the limited availability of Portuguese-Chinese resources in the form of digital corpora and annotated Treebank, an unsupervised learning and a non-aligned bilingual corpus are applied. The proposed method first identifies words related to each of the ambiguous words based on their surrounding words and relative distance. A mathematical model is then applied in the identification of the most suitable sense of an ambiguous word in terms of the related words. All the senses discovered are converted into a set of rules and stored in the sense knowledge base for later use in disambiguation and translation process. Preliminary experiment results show an improvement of 6% in assigning correctly the corresponding translation over the baseline method.

This paper describes a new model for sentence alignment system of structurally different languages such as Chinese and Portuguese. The alignment may be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many. It is also not surprised that the first word or sentence of Chinese is a translation of the last word or sentence of Portuguese. In this proposed method, we try to combine the statistical approach and lexical approach in order to achieve the efficiency and accuracy. In our current research, we first complete the word level alignment by making use of the Chinese-Portuguese dictionary to get the basic translation rate between the two texts. However, the system cannot make a good decision in processing the word alignment by just only concerning the information achieved from the Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. This is because most often the named entities cannot be discovered from the dictionary and this causes the system make a wrong decision. In order to make the system more adaptive, we apply the maximum entropy model to align the named entities without perform the word segmentation for Chinese. Secondly, from the word level alignment, we achieve anchor point and process the sentence level alignment. We use the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to get the statistical information of the sentences. For SVD model, we first set up a matrix which consists of the word level alignment statistic information. Then performs the two dimensional reconstruction of the original matrix. By comparing Figure 1 and Figure 2 (sample fragments of data), we can observe some relationships among the sentences and this can give an approximation of sentence alignment.

The problem of data sparseness is considered as a common problem for Statistical Corpus based Sense Disambiguation approaches [1]. Usually large amounts of data are required in the corpus to guarantee that all senses of an ambiguous word are presented. However, this is not easily achieved, especially for words that do not occur frequently in the training corpus. On the other hand, for languages that do not have large amount of digitized resources, the sparseness problem is even worse.

The 3D microfocus x-ray tomography is one technique of nondestructive testing used in the most different areas of science and technology, given its capacity to generate clean images (practically free of the unsharpness effect) and high resolution reconstructions. The unsharpness effect minimization and space resolution improvement are consequences of the focal spot size reduction in the x-ray microfocus tube to dimensions smaller than 50 micrometers . A problem normally found in the industrial area is the characterization of system parts with similar complex architectures to the bone structures. In the medicine, these structures are quantified through morphologic and topologic parameters such as: volume to volume ratio, area to volume ratio, connectivity, anisotropy and derived parameters, all obtained currently by means of the tomography system and in an automated way. In this work, the results of the complex object characterization are presented (ceramic filter) using 3D tomography system for parameter extraction.